by Oliver Shultz | 11 May 2010 | Career
[Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of personal reflections by Oliver Shultz on the process of building a career in art history.]
Last December, I along with hundreds of other aspiring art historians sent our graduate-school applications out into the void. In the instant after clicking submit, I couldn’t help but wonder how few of us would actually succeed in forging careers as scholars. I felt a pang of solidarity with my competition – we hailed from diverse backgrounds yet sought to storm the same opaque gateways with similarly obsessed-over representations of our potential as scholars. We all imagined those representations passing through the fingers of mysterious committee-members, fated to be judged by the very scholars whose work we’d been studying and whose tenured professorships we hoped to one day possess.
With the anguished hours of compiling applications over, and left with nothing but automated confirmation emails, I began to process this temporary loss of control over my destiny. I felt both deflated and relieved. Now, the waiting began. I told myself that as an aspiring academic, I’d better get used to waiting to hear about life-changing decisions made with similar degrees of opacity– for fellowships, journal articles, conference slots, book proposals, not to mention jobs, and so on. But as the months passed, my dread escalated, fueled by the anxiety of fellow applicants and the dismal economy I hoped not to have to face.
I knew that with waitlists, purgatory sometimes lasts until mid-April, tempting one to obsessively check email and the online forums for news. Luckily for me, in February one of my favorite programs offered me a spot with funding. A few days later, my “two body problem” was solved, when my partner received a similar offer from her top choice, a nearby institution. This fall, we’ll begin our PhD programs simultaneously.
So while I’m both excited and nervous about embarking on my academic career, I’m keenly aware that while I cleared this hurdle, it may only have been by a thin margin and with considerable luck. We’ll never know. For me, unknowing is the essence of the whole affair, which is quite a way to start a career in the production of knowledge.
I like your idea for this series. I, too, recently applied for Ph.D. programs. Unfortunately, because of lack of funding, I wasn’t able to attend for the upcoming academic year. The lack of control I have over my art history/museum career makes me feel vulnerable.
I am definitely looking forward to reading your future reflections.
It would be interesting to see recent statistics about job success in Art History rather than just hearing anecdotal experiences. Unfortunately the only major study that I know of was published in 2003—about the time that I started graduate school. It was done by the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education and the Getty, titled PhDs in Art History – Over a Decade Later. It “surveyed all PhD recipients who graduated from US art and architectural history programs during the academic years 1985 to 1991.” Some of the major findings were quite encouraging. Even though these academics graduated right before the ression of the early 1990s, “nearly 100 percent of the respondents were employed 10 to 15 years after PhD completion, most of them in jobs related to their field of study.” The full text of this study remains online, and can be read here: http://depts.washington.edu/cirgeweb/c/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/arthistory_report.pdf
I think that there are certain aspects of the experience that statistics will never capture, but I too wish we had more of them. I just emailed the center to try to find out if they plan to update their report. This general topic of what goes on behind closed doors in academic committees got a close look in Michèle Lamont’s recent book, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Unfortunately, art history was not one of the fields she studied, but I found the book interesting anyway.